Max Jump Animation - Week 6

In this lesson we had a task to animate Max jumping. Getting max to jump I would find to be a really hard task as your trying to give the impression that Max is actually forcing his body to jump and lift himself off the ground to finally land.

When starting this task for the first time I found it kinda easy to to place Max in his key poses, however when I started to play the aniamtion out it looked too fast and blocky.

                               

So what I needed to do was try and get the aniamtion to run smoothly and look belivable which at the moment it doesn't. I felt I also neede him at the start of the animation to prep himself ready for jumping, for example have him either counting down to when he is about to jump or either streching or something just before he jumps in the aniamtion. I also thought I could maybe add something to the end of the aniamtion like him stabling himself after the jump.

I wanted to first get the aniamtion to run smoother, so I used the dope sheet but I struggled adjusting. The main reason was that I didn't key all of the character on every keypoint. This would be a big reminder for me in the future to always key everything. I was also thinking that maybe I could redo the aniamtion because I felt I could possibly make it alot better than before and it would give me a bit more practice.

So I opened up a new scene and began to redo the jump animation. I started with the pre-jump part of the animation and have Max counting down his jump. When redoing the aniamtion I got a better understanding of where to place my keys for example in the first aniamation jump the key poses were around 5 - 7 keys apart, which was one of the reasons why it didn't look so smooth because I wasn't given the rig any time between the key frames to properly move to the next. However with the new one they were sometimes double that.

Another thing I didn't want his jump to be as hight as it was in the previous animation. I thought it might look better as it would look more belivable than before and might actually look like he is lifting himself of the ground. 

Here's the final aniamtion of Max jumping. I am more happier with my new aniamtion than my previous attempts. However If I could go back and change anything it would be to maybe have his count down at the start to be a bit entertaining and have something at the end like for example have him celebrate his jump.